This puzzle was first proposed in 1848 by a composer of chess puzzles called Max Bezzel and has since spawned much analysis and many variants. Simply phrased, it goes as follows:

“Can you place 8 queen’s on a standard (8×8) chessboard so that no two queen’s threaten each other?”

(Just in case, I’ll remind you a queen can move and attack any number of squares in a straight line – horizontally, vertically, or diagonally)

Here’s one example solution:

By all means have some fun trying to find extra solutions to this with pencil and paper or chessboard, however we do have computers (and SQL!) these days, so this month’s challenge is to try find ALL the possible solutions to this puzzle using T-SQL.

I started my career in IT as a developer with Visual Basic, C# and ASP working with SQL Server backends. For the last ten years though I’ve focused on the SQL Server side of things. Currently I’m working for a leading software vendor for the financial industry as a DBA, doing a mixture of development and data architecture. If I have a speciality it is in making things run faster.